In a piece at Atlantic Joe Pinsker tries to predict how the American experience of SARS-COV-2 will change over the coming year. He ends with spring/summer 2022 and here’s his conclusion:

Life in the warmer months of 2022 should be normal, or at least whatever qualifies as normal post-pandemic. The virus will still exist, but one possibility is that it will be less likely to make people severely ill and that it will, like the flu, circulate primarily in the colder months; some people would still die from COVID-19, but the virus wouldn’t rage out of control again. Meanwhile, Americans should be able to do most, if not all, of the things that they missed so much in 2020 and 2021, mask- and worry-free.

Of course, this dreamy era is still more than a year away, and some unforeseen obstacle could delay the resumption of normalcy. Jha said he couldn’t picture what that might be, though. After a year spent gaming out how bad the pandemic could get, he can finally see ahead to a time when there are no more catastrophes to imagine.

On my part I don’t think events will be nearly as predictable as he apparently does. For example, I don’t know where he gets this:

The good news, though, is that even with these variants, existing vaccines appear to reduce the risk of severe illness, meaning more and more people will be protected as vaccinations continue. And vaccines can change individuals’ risk calculus.

That might be true if people’s present “risk calculus” were based in reason but it isn’t. It it were they’d think that their odds of contracting COVID-19 were much higher than they presently do but that the likelihood of their dying from it was much lower than they do. As it is it’s not too much of an oversimplification to say that they think it’s pretty unlikely they’ll contract it but if they do they’ll die. Sort of like they think of AIDS or Ebola when they should be thinking more like the seasonal flu.

For insight we should turn to how the Spanish flu pandemic wound down a century ago. That’s been covered to death, for example last fall in a piece at the Washington Post:

The longer the influenza virus existed in a certain community, the less lethal the sickness was. An epidemiological study cited by Barry in “The Great Influenza” noted that “the virus was most virulent or most readily communicable when it first reached the state, and thereafter it became generally attenuated.”

Experts say there’s this natural progression where a virus often — but not always — becomes less lethal as time wears on. It’s in the best interest of the virus for it to spread before killing the host.

“The natural order of an influenza virus is to change,” Barry told The Post. “It seems most likely that it simply mutated in the direction of other influenza viruses, which is considerably milder.”

By 1920, the influenza virus was still a threat, but fewer people were dying from the disease. Some scientists at the time started to move on to other research. Barry wrote that William Henry Welch, a famous pathologist from Johns Hopkins who was studying the virus, found it “humiliating” that the outbreak was passing away without experts truly understanding the underlying cause of the disease.

What Welch didn’t predict was that the virus never truly went away. In 2009, David Morens and Jeffery Taubenberger — two influenza experts at the National Institutes of Health — co-authored an article with Anthony S. Fauci explaining how the descendants of the 1918 influenza virus have contributed to a “pandemic era” that has lasted the past hundred years. At the time the article was published, the H1N1 influenza virus in public circulation was a fourth-generation descendant of the novel virus from 1918.

I think that’s almost exactly what will happen with SARS-CoV-2. It will never “go away”. We’ll be inoculating against it forever.

Another factor I can’t predict is how political leaders will respond. So far they’ve been very reluctant to relinquish the dictatorial powers they’ve been wielding for the last year. Will they be relieved to stop issuing directives, refuse to stop issuing them out of “an abundance of caution” or what? And will people just get tired of obeying them? I think there’s evidence that’s the case.

And then there’s the role of COVID-19 as a cudgel to beat over the head of your political opponents. That’s not as effective a weapon as it was a few months ago. Will the news change to fit the politics? Or will the major media outlets continue to promote hysterical reactions because they capture more eyeballs? I simply don’t know.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Rahm Emanuel admonishes the progressives in his political party:

Democrats need to tear a page from the Republican playbook. When interviewing for a job, you don’t lead with self-loathing. Democrats need to assert that they’ve got a record of success. If the GOP could claim that a past Republican president had created 20 million jobs, do you think they would disparage him as a RINO—a Republican in name only? If a GOP president had sparked the longest peacetime economic expansion in the nation’s history, do you think they’d label his efforts as “tepid”?

These aren’t trick questions—of course they wouldn’t. Nevertheless, it’s chic today in certain quarters of the Democratic Party to disparage Presidents Clinton and Obama, who actually did those things, on the misguided pretense that criticizing the progressive past will somehow open the door to a more robust progressive future.

and he recommends a version of Reagan’s “11th Commandment”:

Decades ago, Reagan coined what many call the 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” Democrats don’t need to pretend that every Democrat who ever held office was infallible. But if they want to pursue a progressive agenda and win elections on the economy, they should burnish their own narrative of success.

Franklin Roosevelt established Social Security, and Harry Truman improved it. Lyndon Johnson’s Medicaid planted the seeds for Mr. Clinton’s Children’s Health Insurance Program and Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Mr. Clinton made the tax code more progressive by doubling the tax credit for the working poor, Mr. Obama doubled it again, and now Mr. Biden is working to take the next step. To build a movement, you shouldn’t talk down what you’ve already achieved on behalf of the American people.

I’m not sure of what Mr. Emanuel is trying to accomplish with this op-ed or who his target audience is. Is he trying to protect the Democrats’ tenuous control of federal power? Is it a somewhat desperate attempt on his part at maintaining his own relevance in today’s Democratic Party?

I think he fails to understand the essential nature of progressivism. It is focused on the future, disinterested if not dismissive of the past. Not only that but today’s progressives certainly seem insistent on applying their ever-changing standards to past behaviors. Lyndon Johnson, despite his being the Founding Father of today’s federal government, was effectively “canceled” by Baby Boomers. No Democratic president of the 20th or 21st century could live up to the standards of belief and behavior presently being applied. And former Republican presidents? Fuggedaboutit.

If the progressive wing of the Democratic Party actually achieves control of the party apparatus and the organs of government, who could survive its scrutiny? Certainly not Rahm Emanuel.

To a certain extent Walter Russell Mead’s characterization of differences between Saudi and Arabia in his latest Wall Street Journal column:

The Saudis and Iranians have responded to these changes in different ways. For all its faults and sometimes brutal behavior, the new Saudi power configuration has steered the country toward a recalibration that Washington can live with. As the kingdom warms toward Israel, reforms its textbooks, and gradually lifts selected restrictions on women, the radical Wahhabism that long held the country together is no longer as influential as it once was. There is no intention to make Saudi Arabia either a democracy or a Western-style secular society, and the authorities are tightly policing the boundaries of permitted dissent even as those boundaries shift, but the new direction is significantly better than the old.

and

Tehran is on another path. Seizing the opportunities that chaos offers in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, Iran has moved effectively to expand its regional profile even as it accelerates its nuclear program. American Iran doves hope this was largely a defensive response to Mr. Trump’s maximum-pressure approach and that Tehran will become more tractable as Washington’s hostility diminishes; we shall see. The multiethnic character of the country and the intimate linkages between the religious hierarchy and the state make it hard for Iran to de-emphasize radical religion and hard-line resistance to the West as the regime’s basis for legitimacy—and the military success of Iranian proxies around the region makes it hard to abandon a policy that seems to bring gains. Hard-liners are likely to point to any new U.S. concessions as a sign that their policies are working.

reminds me an old wisecrack I once heard. In a movie hat pits the Mafia against vampires who do you root for? There’s literally no one to root for in contrasting Saudi Arabia with Iran. Neither are our friends and they cannot be our friends, in Iran’s case as long as the present regime or any mullahocracy that replaces it is in power and in Saudi Arabia’s case probably forever.

I wonder what his evidence for this is?

the radical Wahhabism that long held the country together is no longer as influential as it once was

I think the comment reveals a flawed understanding of the government of Saudi Arabia, its society, and Wahhabism. Rather than thinking of the Saudi government as an absolute monarchy or autocracy, think of it more as resembling medieval England. Yes, there’s a king but he’s just one of many lords who wield power. Sometimes he’s the most powerful, sometimes not. As long as rich Saudis are promoting Wahhabism all over the world, as is the case today, its influence is waxing not waning. Just because the king and crown prince don’t emphasize their religious fanaticism doesn’t mean it’s not there, driving Saudi society. I see the monarchy’s moves to allegedly “liberalize” Saudi society by, say, allowing women to drive not as a mark of waning Wahhabi influence but as a sign that MBS wants to consolidate the monarchy’s power and a testament to Wahhabism’s continued power.

The situation in Iran is almost the opposite. There are plenty of educated, largely secularist Iranians who chafe at the restrictions the present regime imposes on them but as long as the regime remains in place and is supported by the military, the mullahs, the old revolutionaries, and conservative Islamist radicals largely consisting of people in rural areas and the urban poor, the regime will stay in control. Being nuclear-armed will provide insurance against being removed by foreigners.

He concludes:

This is the principal danger to the Biden administration’s so-far successful attempts to travel its own course between the Trump and Obama policies. The question going forward is whether the administration can impose its vision on Iran while keeping European and Middle East allies onside.

only we have no “Middle East allies”. We have a client (Israel), we have a hostile (Iran), and belligerent non-combatants (the Gulf States). And we have dwindling material interests. It’s time for our Middle East policy to change in a direction which those who’ve built their entire careers on the status quo will fight to oppose.

By the way the answer to the question in the title is that you root for the popcorn concession. I can’t root for them, either. They don’t have American interests at heart.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are skeptical of the Biden Administration’s policy with respect to the Middle East, at least in terms of its early returns:

The Biden team seems to have hoped that “recalibrating” the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has fought the 2015 Houthi takeover in neighboring Yemen, would draw down the war there. The Houthis have other ideas. In early February the State Department said it would reverse the group’s designation as a terrorist organization, but days later it had to release a statement that it was “deeply troubled by continued Houthi attacks.”

The attacks have persisted and now Foggy Bottom’s language is more direct: “The United States strongly condemns the Houthis’ attacks on population centers in Saudi Arabia on Saturday, February 27,” State said on Sunday. “We call on the Houthis to end these egregious attacks.”

But why would the Houthis listen, when the U.S. has legitimized them with a sanctions reprieve in return for nothing, and when it broadcasts a strategy of accommodating their patrons in Tehran? Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is on the defensive as Washington downgrades the alliance and restricts arms sales.

I need to take care in my next comments to avoid being guilty of what I’m criticizing but I believe that the Biden Administration has bad assumptions about human behavior, foreign policy, and the U. S. place in the world. Although we did not cause the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, U. S. fingerprints are all over it. And the problems don’t pertain merely to Yemen but extend to Afghanistan, Syria, and everywhere else we’re employing similar tactics.

How do we know against whom to deploy drone attacks? It would be nice to believe its via satellite imaging or some other form of automated information gathering but I’d bet a shiny new dime that targets are mostly identified via human intelligence and most of that is provided by local governments. I’d also bet that those local governments don’t make tidy distinctions between terrorists and their political enemies.

In Yemen I believe that for the last 15 years we’ve been propping up a government that doesn’t have a great deal of popular support and going after its political enemies in the name of counter-terrorism. That hasn’t caused an uprising but has contributed to it. I don’t agree with the WSJ editors that the Houthis are merely proxies for the Iranians. I think it’s nearly the opposite: a homegrown opposition to the Yemeni government has gained support from Iran because it was attacked by Saudi Arabia not the other way around.

Similarly, in Afghanistan our counter-insurgency operations have been almost entirely misplaced. People who oppose the corrupt Afghan government we support are driven into the arms of the Taliban. The only way to win this game is not to play. That was also my criticism of paying bounties for information on terrorists in Afghanistan. How do you distinguish between actual Al Qaeda or Taliban and people your informants just don’t like including people who oppose the Kabul government? You don’t. You rely on your human informants.

In Syria despite our best efforts the Allawite government just wouldn’t cooperate. They stubbornly resisted our attempts to set up an Islamist Sunni government so we perversely supported Al Qaeda and DAESH in the name of human rights. When we reversed course and stopped providing support to people hate us just because they hate the Syrian government, too, it allowed the Syrian government with the assistance of the Russians to prevail against terrorists who had Saudi support and the Turks. The Israelis, who hate the Syrian government for many reasons including its resistance to the establishment of a Greater Israel, hope the civil war continues in Syria indefinitely.

Let me just sum up by saying let’s not overestimate the U. S. role. We didn’t cause these conflicts but we’re not helping to quell them much, either, and our efforts are all too frequently having perverse outcomes.

I don’t usually comment much about the politics of states other than my own but I consider this a post about the state of journalism rather than one about New York. I was struck by the contrasting treatments of Andrew Cuomo, who’s been accused of a number of transgressions including his stonewalling of inquiries about his handling of COVID-19, particularly in the early days, sexual harassment, and bullying. The editors of the Washington Post are critical of him:

IMAGINE THIS scenario. The chief executive officer of a company is alone in the office with a much younger woman who works for him. He asks about her sex life. Has she ever had sex with older men and does age make a difference in romantic relationships? The woman is unsettled by what she sees as a sexual advance and reports it. It’s hard to imagine that, in a well-run company, that executive wouldn’t be asked to resign — or be fired on the spot — for his behavior.

Should the standard be lower for those who hold public office and the public trust? That is the central question that must be addressed in the developing scandal over allegations that New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) sexually harassed two women — Lindsey Boylan and Charlotte Bennett — who used to work for him. The allegations come as Mr. Cuomo is also under fire over the state’s response to coronavirus cases in nursing homes and whether nursing home deaths were underreported to avoid federal scrutiny.

The question we should be asking is not just what would happen to a CEO but what how would he have been treated if he were a Republican? The editors of the NYT are comparatively silent on the matter—ironic in that it was the NYT that broke the story of the governor’s harassments.

Why the different treatments? I think that the Times being in New York has something to do with it. The governor remains in a position to make life difficult for them and, consequently, self-preservation dictates a light touch. Additionally, the NYT is significantly more partisan than the WaPo and, well, Mr. Cuomo is a Democrat. The Kerenskyite posture presently being taken also motivates maintaining a light touch.

I don’t know the truth of the matter but I do think that the governor’s responses, essentially, hoocoodanode, don’t hold water. Since returning to the corporate world I have been compelled to sit through annual training sessions (what used to be called “sensitivity training”). If Mr. Cuomo’s participation in similar sessions is not mandatory, I can only say it’s good to be king.

The key point here is that as with many other similar prominent men everybody knew. The NYT should be ashamed of itself as should the New York Democratic leadership.

I found this post at The War Zone by Joseph Trevithick about Lockheed-Martin’s “Speed Racer” project fascinating:

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works advanced projects bureau has officially revealed the design of its secretive Speed Racer air vehicle. The missile-shaped unmanned system is ostensibly intended to serve as an experiment in digital engineering techniques, but has the potential to be the basis for future swarming drones and low-cost cruise missiles.

Steve Trimble, Aviation Week’s defense editor and friend of The War Zone, was first to report on the new information about Speed Racer. He was also able to confirm that a computer-generated segment in a video Lockheed Martin had released ahead of the Air Force Associations’ 2021 Virtual Aerospace Warfare Symposium, which wrapped up yesterday, did indeed depict this air vehicle. The company similarly acknowledged that a rendering it released last year was also of Speed Racer.

both for its subject matter and its opacity. I’ll try to clear up some of the opacity.

“Skunk Works” is a reference to a newspaper comic strip that has been defunct for almost 50 years. It has come to refer to any free-wheeling laboratory.

“Speed Racer” is a reference to a Japanese anime and manga franchise that is more than 50 years old.

I did read L’il Abner (the comic strip). I did not watch Speed Racer.

As to the project itself, “Speed Racer” appears to be a proof-of-concept and, as far as I can tell, the concept they’re trying to prove has less to do with the specific craft being designed than with the rapid application developmental approach being used to design it. Whether that’s a worthwhile activity I can’t actually say but it certainly looks as though those involved are having fun doing it.

This morning I read a post at Fast Company that’s sure to raise some hackles. Its subject was the 100 most over-compensated CEOs:

In 2019, the average top CEO’s pay increased 14% from 2018 to $21.3 million. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, earned $280,621,552 in total compensation—more than 1,000 times the income of a median company employee.

Pichai tops the new list of “100 Most Overpaid CEOs,” the seventh annual report published by As You Sow, a nonprofit promoting corporate social responsibility through shareholder advocacy. The report, subtitled “Are Fund Managers Asleep at the Wheel?” finds that, while shareholder opposition to this excess is growing, many of the biggest financial fiduciaries still did not vote against excessive CEO pay in last year’s annual shareholder meetings.

The report calculates how much CEOs should have earned in 2019 based on total shareholder return over the past five years, and then calculates the surplus pay they received; for instance, the report suggests that 95% of Pichai’s salary (a total of $266,698,263) was excessive. It found that, in Alphabet’s case, the CEO-to-employee pay ratio was 1,085:1; The Walt Disney Co.’s, ranked fifth, was 911:1; and The Kraft Heinz Co.’s, in sixth place, was 1,034:1.

The source of the hackles-raising will, I have little doubt, be who the heck are they to decide who’s over-compensated?

I think that both points are worthwhile and the underlying question is why are these people paid so much? I think it can be attributed to several factors including the dominance of funds in investing nowadays and increasing stock value rather than expanding enterprise value as a business strategy. As long as the stock continues to increase in value, fund managers have little incentive to complain about over-compensated CEOs.

You might be interested in looking at Mark P. Mills’s post on modern industrial policy at Manhattan Institute. It’s lengthy and mostly devoted to a single insight—there isn’t as much of a bright line between manufacturing and services as there used to be:

First: for several years, there has been an ongoing fusion of services within and around manufacturing enterprises. As a result, the official data that are the foundation for commentary and public-policy proposals misconstrue economic reality: many jobs and economic activities categorized as “services” are, in fact, part of “industry.” This fusion is no small matter. Across a wide range of industries, research shows that services account for 30%–90% of the value of manufacturing output. The majority of these services are not clerical, back-office tasks; they involve every aspect of the production ecosystem. Some 40%–90% of those services are performed by outsourced—but not necessarily offshored—providers. Overall, some significant share, perhaps 20%–50%, of the economic and labor activity involved in manufacturing is now being erroneously counted under “services.”

My contribution to his insight is that will only increase over time. Additive manufacturing is itself manufacturing-as-a-service.

I would articulate it a bit differently. There’s “primary production”, e.g. agriculture, mining, lumbering, making iron and steel, manufacturing widgets, etc., and there’s “secondary production”—accounting, advertising, sales, and most of the other things that are done in a modern economy. Nowadays some important secondary production barely existed a dozen years ago or didn’t exist at all, e.g. web services, managing social media presence. These are among the fastest-growing sectors today.

A major difference between primary and secondary production is that primary production tends to be a lot more labor-intensive than secondary. Much of secondary production employs very few people at all. A substantial distinction is that secondary production tends not to emit carbon or pollute the environment in the way primary production does.

Should we conclude from those differences that we should be emphasizing secondary production and de-emphasizing primary production? It would be nice to think so but there are major risks incurred in that strategy as we have learned in the last year including becoming dependent for vital goods on other, not necessarily friendly countries.

My view is that we need much, much more primary production here in the U. S. but we also need to manage it a lot better. That will both create the much-celebrated “good jobs” and be more environmentally sound than what we’re doing.

There are a few stories being commented on today. For example, progressives are beginning to figure out that they can’t just push their agenda through the conference because there aren’t enough of them to do it. It’s not just intransigent Republicans. It’s Senate Democrats who disagree with them. It’s the Senate parliamentarian doing her job.

But mostly Donald Trump is sucking all of the air out of the room again via his appearance at CPAC (an event to which I pay no attention). When will media outlets figure out that the way to increase his influence is to devote so much of their attention to him? That’s how he secured the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2016. It’s how he got elected while spending a fraction of the money the Clinton campaign did.

Cover? Yes. But then move on.

I recognize the media are on the horns of a dilemma. They capture more eyeballs when they devote all of their time to Trump. Just say “No”.